Peer relationships play a critical role in academic performance, yet their link in higher education remains underexplored. This study introduces commensality--shared mealtimes--as a novel proxy for peer acceptance and examines its relationship with academic outcomes across student groups. Using 2,717,938 transaction records from 3355 first-year…

This study aimed to reveal the perspectives of academics on the competencies of students who are placed in universities through a first-place quota system. The study has been organized within the framework of a qualitative research approach with a phenomenological design. The data collected through a semi-structured interview form were analyzed…

Background: Academic achievement goals are important for student outcomes, including their well-being, collaboration with peers, and academic achievement. Theory and research also indicate that achievement goals are linked to students' social context, playing a role in forming and maintaining peer relationships within the school environment. Aims:…

Instructors may use low-cost, light-touch strategies to help students achieve optimal effort in demanding upper-level courses. The authors of this study exploit an intervention that provides a series of personalized feedback emails to students about their relative performance, which is tied to approving messages or tips that encourage improvement.…

Subjective social status in school (or school social status) refers to youths' perception of their position relative to peers in school. School social status has been associated with various socio-emotional outcomes in adolescents, such as internalizing symptoms (e.g., social anxiety and depression). Another closely related construct that…

Artificial scarcity occurs when individuals or groups face an inability to access or are excluded from sufficient or desired resources, even when those resources might be available (Daoud, 2015). This results in situations that work contrary to the aspirations of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and sustainability. This conceptual…

In this paper, we examine how Success Training for Academic Resiliency (STAR) Lite, an advising intervention program, influenced undergraduate students to overcome academic probation into achieving good academic standing. We use descriptive quantitative methods to assess the impact of program participation for 194 undergraduate students on…

During COVID, HyFlex gained popularity and became a "new normal" that educators need to consider as an effective instructional approach. Previous research offers conflicting findings related to the impact of HyFlex instruction on students' basic psychological needs and academic performance. Our investigation provides insight into a…

This study examined whether first-time full-time freshman students' sense of purpose predicted their progress towards a degree. Freshman students (N = 421, 62.2% females) completed self-report measures of sense of purpose and academic commitments within the first month of starting college; a year later, the data on first-year progress towards a…

Although popular educational theories regard ability as being intrinsically multidimensional, academic ability is typically measured with a single, overall score. In this paper, we examine data from the adaptive tutoring system ALEKS to compare three metrics that measure different constructs of mathematical ability that vary in dimensionality. We…

Background/purpose: Home-based exams were introduced during COVID-19 with an open-book format and limited control over dishonest student behavior. Such exams were used in lieu of traditional, closed-book school-based exams as a necessity due to the pandemic. This article investigates whether or not students' grades from home-based assessment exams…

I show that there are better measures of student college performance than grade point average (GPA) by undertaking a fine-grained empirical investigation of grading within a large public university. The value of using GPA as a measure of comparative performance is undermined by academically weaker students taking courses where the grading is more…

Background: Given the importance of engineers to a nation's economy and potential innovation, it is imperative to encourage more students to consider engineering as a college major. Previous studies have identified a broad range of high school experiences and demographic factors associated with engineering major choice; however, these factors have…

The advent of the integrated learning system (ILS) offers instructors opportunities to provide students with feedback-enabled, interactive learning exercises as online supplements to assigned textbooks. Major college publishers are now bundling an ILS with many of their textbook offerings in undergraduate courses in psychology and other fields. We…

Social media platforms and other internet sites may propagate inaccurate or misleading information. This misinformation encourages speculation, rumors, and mistrust in established science. In the current study, we attempted to determine whether biology and environmental science students at a small college are able to transfer their critical…